Question: Vinod Malhotra is trying to decide how many wait staff he will need to support his restaurant operations for the next month. First he needs to identify a suitable forecasting model to estimate next month's demand. He is considering three alternative models:
Model 1: Four-month moving average
Model 2: Four-month weighted moving average with weights 5 .1, .2, .3, .4.
Model 3: Exponential smoothing with a = 0.7
Based on past performance, which model should Vinod use?